What is Chronic Illness?

 

As an HR manager or director, you know how important great employees are and how crucial they are to your business.

But chronic illness poses a serious threat to them and their performance. You want your employees to feel comfortable and well cared for at work knowing that they have the tools to succeed despite their chronic illness.

You ask yourself, what exactly is a chronic illness?

It’s a health condition or disease, long lasting in its effects that come with time. So where does the chronic part come in? Chronic means that it lasts at least three months, six months, a year. It's long term. It's not three weeks, four weeks, six weeks. It’s long in duration. Also, it's ongoing in medical attention. So, you seek medical attention, many doctor's appointments throughout the year, over time.

It also limits your daily activities. Daily activities include bathing, showering, grooming, getting dressed, toileting, getting in bed and out of bed, in or out of a chair, eating, walking, or climbing stairs.

Leading factors of a chronic illness are tobacco use harmful use of alcohol, increased blood pressure, increased cholesterol numbers, increased glucose numbers, obesity, unhealthy eating, no physical movements. But I also think stress can be a factor in that and we'll cover stress at a later time.

But then you might be asking, what about expectancy of life? Well, with a chronic illness, your life expectancy can be decreased. Someone without a chronic illness may live 15 to 20 years from age 67, but someone with a chronic illness may only live as much as seven years 7 years beyond age 67.

How many people have chronic illnesses? It is estimated about 133 million Americans live with a chronic illness. That's about half of the population. Six out of 10 Americans in the US have at least one chronic disease. Four out of 10 have two or more. That's a lot of people, and for some reason it's higher in women at 28.4% than men at 25.9%.

So why is it higher in women? I think one of those things is we have that ‘want to do it all’ syndrome. We work, we take care of the kids, we take care of the house. We never put ourself first. We always put someone else first. We're running our kids here and there and making dinner, do the grocery shopping, do the laundry, all of that. Plus, if you have a high-stressed job that's very demanding, you have all of that stuff in that mixture there. I think that's one of the reasons that it's higher in women.

When it comes to the business aspect, it can affect your bottom line. It affects your absenteeism, it affects your productivity, it affects your turnover rates. So that's why it's so important to understand chronic illness and learn to work with your employees.